Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting

By : Jean-Georges Valle
Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting

By: Jean-Georges Valle

Overview of this book

If you’re looking for hands-on introduction to pentesting that delivers, then Practical Hardware Pentesting is for you. This book will help you plan attacks, hack your embedded devices, and secure the hardware infrastructure. Throughout the book, you will see how a specific device works, explore the functional and security aspects, and learn how a system senses and communicates with the outside world. You’ll set up a lab from scratch and then gradually work towards an advanced hardware lab—but you’ll still be able to follow along with a basic setup. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with the global architecture of an embedded system and sniff on-board traffic, learn how to identify and formalize threats to the embedded system, and understand its relationship with its ecosystem. You’ll discover how to analyze your hardware and locate its possible system vulnerabilities before going on to explore firmware dumping, analysis, and exploitation. The reverse engineering chapter will get you thinking from an attacker point of view; you’ll understand how devices are attacked, how they are compromised, and how you can harden a device against the most common hardware attack vectors. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with security best practices and understand how they can be implemented to secure your hardware.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting to Know the Hardware
6
Section 2: Attacking the Hardware
12
Section 3: Attacking the Software

Scoring your vulnerabilities

Remember how we used the "gut feeling" we had about the kind of attacker that could compromise a system (In Chapter 4, Approaching and Planning the Test) to gauge the time per scenario? We can use the same approach to build a scoring matrix that can be formally validated upfront with our client.

Our scoring matrix is usually a two-dimensional array along the following two dimensions:

  • Technical complexity or probability of occurrence of the risk (depending on the specific circumstances)
  • Impact

For the technical complexity, it could very well happen that we over- or under-evaluated the effort put into a specific scenario. With the actual vulnerabilities in hand, we can be much more precise about the actual technical complexity that was necessary to compromise the device's function.

The actual impact has to be discussed in advance with the client. It is very clear that an SME and a giant, multinational group will cope...